


The Most Beautiful Thing...

by Bluewolf458



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-29
Updated: 2011-10-29
Packaged: 2017-10-25 01:46:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/270364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluewolf458/pseuds/Bluewolf458





	The Most Beautiful Thing...

The Most Beautiful Thing...

by Bluewolf

Two tents sat, a few yards apart, on a site big enough to hold a dozen more, but the three men and the teenage son of one of them all hoped that nobody else would arrive to interrupt their peaceful weekend. The four sat around their fire, patiently waiting for their dinner (carried in for that night, though they hoped for a big enough catch of fish next day to supply their needs for Saturday night dinner) to finish cooking.

This would be the last weekend of fishing for the season, though.

Daryl had finally come to terms with his parents' divorce and, now sixteen, insisted on spending more time with his father than he had once done - at the time of the divorce, because Joan kept insisting how obsessed Simon was with his work, the court had given Simon very limited visiting rights. Prickly when he was fourteen, rebellious at fifteen, inclined to reject anything his father liked (even when he did in fact like it himself) because his father liked it, Daryl seemed to have matured considerably since his sixteenth birthday. They had never told Simon that the week before his birthday, Blair had sat down with Daryl and given him the opportunity to spill all his grievances, both real and imagined, and then talked him through them.

The four tried, as far as possible, to have at least one weekend a month away from Cascade, weekends  spent camping when the three older men could relax, freed from the stress of police work.

Their meal finally cooked, they ate, washed up, and then as the light faded from the sky, watched the stars coming out for a few minutes before they retired to their sleeping bags.

***

Daryl slept fitfully.

It was the first weekend that the stars had been obvious - over the summer only a handful of the brightest had shown - and growing up in a city he had seldom had the opportunity to see the stars. Finding himself awake, and with no sign that it was anywhere near dawn, he wriggled out of his sleeping bag - he could, he rationalised, always claim that he needed a pee if by any chance he woke his father. Unzipping the tent door he crawled out, looked up...

"Dad! Blair! Jim!" he yelled. "Wake up! Come and see!"

"What is it?" Simon reached him before the other two had even left their tent.

"Look!"

Jim and Blair joined them as Simon stared upwards. The northern sky was covered by a flickering greenish light that hung there in slightly irregular folds.

"What is it?" Daryl asked.

"It's an aurora," Blair said. "A curtain aurora. I've only seen that once before - just moving rays of light is far more common."

"It's... it's beautiful." Daryl whispered.

"Yes," Blair agreed. "It's one of the most beautiful things you'll ever see."

 


End file.
